Love&
Death
@
Walcot
Chapel
Carolyn Savidge
Your mouth, the shape and taste of your kiss trapped in the mesh
This is the closest thing I have to touching you
Embrace DNR presents a complex and deeply intimate dialogue between Carolyn and her late husband, a dialogue first recorded in sound when she was watching over him as he succumbed to fatal illness. Subsequently she has reworked their deeply sad yet inspiring conversation, in sound and text and in photographed performance.
The whole creates a moving portrayal of the power, and boundlessness, of love. This is a first presentation of elements of a much larger piece that will be shown in a major exhibition at 44AD, Bath in 2016.
Stephen Lewis
In Crematorium Stephen stares death in the face in a way that many people would find impossible to do. He spent a year photographing, with meticulous attention, the last journey that we all face, whether it is by fire or burial.
"
"I initially set out to document the mechanical process of cremation but found my own mantra for the project in the phrase 'the Devil's in the detail'. Little elements of the process became fascinating and I found even the most mundane of objects in such an environment became charged with significance and symbolism. I discovered metaphors for death, suggestions of religious belief, of an afterlife, even the evidence of life itself."
Teresa Harrison
In Dearest Ruth Teresa recycles found images and texts to reimagine the life of someone she never knew, combining installation with social media as her tools.
"Ruth, although active in her community as a volunteer for charities and at the Fitzwilliam Museum, had a lonely end. It was terribly sad to find out such a generous person in life was not found for some time in death.
"She was a hoarder, with every room full of stuff. You could have picked a newspaper from the past thirty years. As I went through this archive of her life I felt she deserved to be known. I started as the invisible observer but was totally charmed by Ruth and her world. "
Rosie Mclay
Provoked by the death of her mother and grandmother -within one year- Rosie started to reflect on our vulnerability to illness and how close we are to mortality. In Quietus she present casts of one of her breasts in a range of different raw minerals that can be found in the human body, to conjure thoughts about the body as material and our physical destiny after death.
"Through an exploration of material I have been assessing the body's natural decline into death. As well as the physical and biological changes I have been investigating the spiritual progression to silence.
"By manipulating a wide range of precious as well as worthless materials, I hope to to form a series of objects that may encourage my audience to consider our bodies and how delicate they are to disease, in a way that does not cause dismay but fascination and curiosity."
Cathy Hayes
"I am examining the mythology of the most fundamental of religious female icons, the Virgin Mary, and looking at all aspects of her life, from love, sexuality, conception to death and her Assumption. My aim is to examine what impact this characterisation has had on woman’s lives.
"What troubles me is the agency that religious dogma still holds over the lives of women, despite western culture’s steady secularisation. The construction of the Virgin as the perfect woman, and of Mary Magdalene as the perfect whore, is a binary which is still perpetuated today in representations of femininity."
In her painting Crucifixion of the Virgin and her installation
The Reliquary Cathy conducts a different kind of confrontation from Stephen Lewis's Crematorium. She addresses images and objects that carry deep signifiance to billions of people
all over the world.
Deborah Harding
Deborah breaths new life into a longstanding memorial tradition - the stained glass window.
Love and Death are life -
darkness and light come from both:
paradise no more.
Geoff Dunlop
The setting of Geoff's Ex Memoria is the graveyard - and in this piece too there is a distant reference to the stained glass tradition. Here the annual cycles of the death and rebirth of plantlife contrast with the much slower decay of the humans in their graves, and the extremely gradual dissolution of the graves themselves. The inscriptions the tombs and headstones carry, describing long lost lives, are the last traces to fade of the people they commemorate.
"Like any ruin, these memorials, moving towards their own extinction, carry an aesthetic appeal, a poignancy that arises as we contemplate our own mortality. But even graves and the other memorials to the dead eventually lose their function, their role as messengers from another time. The solid statements of both fact and opinion ("Here lies George, a good son, husband and father") crumble and dissolve into their elemental constituents. Entropy finally renders the last of us
-our reputations, even our names- null and void."
Geoff also includes images from his series Go Gentle, a reflection on Dylan Thomas's celebrated poem, that was inspired by what he considered to be the cruel death of his father
Nicholas Hayes
Remembering Unloved is a re-presentation of an exhibition that was installed in Walcot Chapel in the two weeks before Love & Death. That exhibition, Unloved, addressed the shocking fact that seven million children die every year from preventable causes ... more than all the victims of the Holocaust. This unintended genocide is a direct consequence of the global economic system.
Unloved represented the appalling loss of life and tragic loss of potential with a 24 sq metre installation of seven million grains of rice. On this revisiting of the exhibition the rice is stored in two modest sacks. It represents an effort to keep alive the memory and the
message of the original.
Sarah McCluskey
"Heaven or Hell Bagatelle invites the observer to play what might be the final game that presents itself to us as St Peter meets us at the pearly gates. (Actually wouldn’t it be great if St Peter were dressed as a Cockney Pearly King ? I’m reassured already by that thought.)
You may be designated a slot in Purgatory, Limbo or suffer endless Flagellation for your worldly sins. I cannot take responsibility for where you may end up, or where your balls will take you. But maybe it’s not to late for any of the players to....REPENT!
Ann Jordan
For the duration of FaB15, a vast woollen shroud will be suspended over the chapel's central performance space - acting like a protecting veil for the exhibition, its artists and visitors. The shroud, given the Celtic name Cwtch, was hand-spun by Ann from sheep wool she gathered from the surrounding landscape during an extended performance on the Black Mountain in Wales.
The original setting for Cwtch was the Bronze Age funeral cairn Carnau Garreg y Las, and was part of a group of works Ann made, with others, to commemorate the lives of men killed in the coal mines and quarries of the Black Mountain in the nineteenth century. The bodies of the miners were carried on a coffin trail over the mountain for burial in their home villages.
As well as being a memorial, the piece is also a celebration of a unique landscape, sculpted today by sheep farming.
I dreamed of birds again last night.
Of beaks and claws and feathers.
Voices whisper to me, calling me home.
It is time, they say.
But I have lived too long amongst strangers
and I have forgotten how to fly.
Flight explores the theme of loss, in both a personal and environmental context, the importance of remembrance and of transformation. The altar at the heart of the installation is a place of remembrance for all that
we have lost. It is dedicated to the memory of lost places and species
as well as lost loved ones. It can also be seen as a receptacle for memories, and an invitation to call to mind that which no longer exists, yet
which still resides within heart and soul.
"On the altar, you’ll find some paper birds. Please feel free to write on one of these birds and add it to the installation. You could write the name of a loved one or a place that has been lost, or perhaps you may prefer to describe a memory.
"You are also welcome to leave an offering of your own on the altar."
Carolyn Savidge
In Harvest Carolyn sets up a raised bed of earth - close to the Flight installation and to Cairn, where people can also plant a
wish, memory or message.
This group of installations together reflect the importance of communication with the people who have gone before us, that must surely be as old humanity itself. Whether symbolic or, as many believe, real, these conversations with the dead occur in cultures and belief systems everywhere.
Kenji Lim
Cairn is a pile of stones, built by Kenji in front of the chapel. It is intended to evoke all the many raw monuments that can be found in remote places all over the world, from Carnau Garreg y Las in Wales, to Kailash in Tibet, from North America to the South Pacific. Many cairns are built simply to mark the way across mountainscapes and deserts but some are made as spontaneous memorials to the dead, sites of communication.
Kenji invites visitors to place paper messages, wishes, memories and prayers within the stone pile .